Ok I stand corrected on the Viva length =) I'm at an institute where everyone has different universities so I see all the different rules each one has, and hadn't heard of anyone here having a Viva shorter than 2.5-3 hours, but of course that's not representative of everywhere!

You really are expecting far too much from yourself, I doubt anyone with a PhD did so without at least one major error. It's how we learn and get better. I would go with the advice of your supervisors as they know the subject best. I identify species in my PhD and I bet if I went through my samples again and again I'd find tonnes of mistakes, but that is expected, you have a large number of things to find and ID in a short space of time there is a margin of error that comes along with that (I did this in an official government capacity before the PhD and they actually had a statistic on how many species you could miss when picking them out and how many you could mis-ID and it was a fairly generous amount and that was going with EU law so don't be so hard on yourself for missing one or two things!). You will get better the more samples you do but no one is ever perfect. If you are feeling so down please please contact a counsellor or go to your GP, your PhD is not worth your health, you are more important!

Is there any way you could go into industry and volunteer to get relevant experience? It may not be academic but it still looks very good on your CV.

Did they say exactly what they wanted you to change? Sometimes major corrections are given for relatively minor things. I'm not quite at your stage yet, but talking to people who have been there a lot of my friends got major corrections because of university rules where you could only have a short amount of time to do minor corrections (such as a month) and they were working full time so they gave them the longer time period. So major corrections may not be as bad as you think? I wouldn't turn down your jobs as you need to eat and pay bills! I don't know anyone who hasn't worked at the same time as corrections so you should be ok. You should be given very specific instructions on what needs changing so once you have that perhaps it won't look as bad as you're imagining. Perhaps it will help to give yourself a little break and then start after Christmas. Oh and 1.5 hours is the max for your viva? I've never heard anything like that before, I don't know anyone who hasn't taken at least 3 hours! Universities differ so much in their rules it's confusing!

One of my supervisors is a little like that, he would suggest crazy things like massive experiments and say 'oh but it will only take a week and use £100 of your budget' when in reality it would have taken 5 months and cost a good few grand. Luckily I have another supervisor that is a lot more down to earth. I think some forget the realities of research when they have been stuck behind a desk or lecturing for so long and don't realise their ideas are ridiculous. Could you research and think up your own ideas and do them without having to go to your supervisors, or at least go to them with a clear plan of your ideas with a defensive argument ready in case they question it?

If you are really stuck and don't have any ideas perhaps water down their until it is more realistic and do-able?

It does sound like he is just the type of character that would happily carry on being paid for, and if your parents don't question why his PhD has taken so long or look into his finances I guess they might carry on paying for a long time. It is good that he actually works part time at least he has some work ethic, but part-time isn't enough to live well in London as we all know how extortionate it is there. The best thing to do might be to wait to see if he does come clean over Christmas and see how your parents deal with it. Perhaps they might just reduce how much they give him slowly until he finds his feet?

Hi Ganesha,

It really sounds like you are not in the best of places right now. The way you are analysing what has happened to you over and over is not healthy. If you are struggling with feeling down or stressed please try and find a counsellor or even a friend who can just listen and let you get it out.

When it comes to your PhD you have said it's already been 3 months since the Viva and you only have 3 left. Get your head down, do your corrections and fight for it. Your supervisors don't want you to fail as it does look back on them but they will be very time stretched so you need to have clear questions for them, so go back to them with your edits and ask for specific help if you need it. But ultimately this is your PhD and you have to do the work, you should have very clear instructions of what to change from your examiners so work on those. If the instructions aren't good enough perhaps you can ask for more clarification? Good luck!

Has he suspended the studies indefinitely? The way you deal with this depends on your family dynamics really. If it was me I'd have told your brother how lucky he had it from the start, but then some people never really appreciate things until they stop. Are your parents still paying his living expenses? Once he tells them he has stopped, I'd talk to them and tell them to stop paying. As in most cases I've seen people continue being unappreciative and spoiled until they have to fend for themselves and realise how hard real life is. It might sound a bit harsh but I have seen it happen so often and people come out the other side much more capable and usually happier.

Ah yeah I just looked at all the jobs that uni had advertised and this one came up:

It's the same description but a lot more money! So guessing the other one was a mistake and just the wrong description put up for the programme assistant jobs?

I'm in a similar position, 5 months left of funding and totally conflicted about what to do next. I love my subject, and I love research but I am getting increasingly frustrated about how the academic world works. I quite like the idea of a postdoc too, getting to do a slightly different project for a short amount of time, but I'm also worried about job security (I'm almost hitting 30) and would prefer a permanent job! Plus I do not expect a postdoc to be 'easy' I expect it to be as hard or harder than the PhD as you have even more pressure to publish.

As others have said there are so many jobs that you could do, perhaps in your break after handing in you could volunteer at various places to get a feeling for different jobs or types of research that you might fancy? I'm not a chemist so don't know the specifics but there are other options such as teaching, patent attorney (you can get into that with just a science background), scientists for government agencies or research council funded institutes (such as the EA or BAS etc). Do some research and see what interests you!

Everyone makes mistakes, don't be so harsh on yourself. The further through my PhD I get (just got a few months left) the more I see that most of the published projects in my field are terrible science, with some jazzy language to make them sound better than they are. I've actually heard my eminent scientists talk about how they bodged experiments or had to change hypotheses or fiddle with data as it showed something it wasn't meant to! It's awful and I don't believe in that kind of thing but it makes me realise the few mistakes I have made are nothing compared to some high-up people! So take a deep breath, realise a PhD is a training exercise and that you have learned from your mistakes which is what it is all about!

I've done some A-level tutoring through my PhD, £25 an hour and you can do it in the evenings/weekends and still concentrate on your PhD the rest of the time. There are websites you can sign up to that ask for your CV degree certificates etc where parents and pupils search for nearby tutors. Depends if your subject matches up to an A-level though I guess!

The beginning of any PhD can be a bit 'slow'. I started my PhD in October, but because I am a field biologist I couldn't begin my sampling process until April the following year. So for 6 months I was left to read papers and practice techniques but I couldn't produce any data. I think this is often the case in science PhD's so I wouldn't worry too much about it. The other people in my institute who started at the same time but are desk based and so could hit the ground running aren't that far ahead of me (I'm just in my fourth year now I got 3.5 years funding so have 5 months of funding left). Although they have produced papers whereas my field samples needed 2 years of analysing in the lab before I got results so my papers will be post-hand in!

Anyway my point was that PhD's are all different and so you may not be able to be in the lab straight away, but this may be a good thing as you get to perfect your ideas, and many may look like they are getting data but it might be just preliminary studies which are not used in their thesis. Once you get into the lab it will be all steam ahead and you'll yearn for the days when you had time to feel bored haha!

I wouldn't judge a whole department and university on one week. It may be that it's a time when everyone has tight deadlines they are trying to meet. I would never leave something unless I gave it a good couple of months. Yes, finding a job afterwards may be hard, but as you say it was hard without a PhD too, that's just the job market at the moment. If you really love your subject it will be worth it, if you don't then have a think about what you really want.

You are describing how I felt through most of my second and third year. Don't worry I'm pretty sure it's a normal feeling. Someone said to me the other day 'remember a PhD is just a training scheme, you are not meant to be the best at anything, you are meant to be learning your field and new skills and by the end of your PhD you may be good at them but certainly still not the best and no one should expect that'. I thought that was good advice! And working for 7-8 hours a day is normal, near deadlines I work a bit more but otherwise I stick to that amount, otherwise you can burn out very quickly and make yourself ill.

I'm also not sure about working in Academia, but a PhD can be used in a hundred different ways, we did a course about this at my institute and it was actually really reassuring. They showed as statistics of where people end up 5 years after their PhD's only a small percentage (I think 30%) ended up in Academia, other options included teaching, starting a business, management in companies, working for government agencies etc etc. A PhD shows commitment and project management skills which can be used in a huge amount of future careers.